Australian State May Give Students Linux Laptops 302
Whiteox writes "The Australian Prime Minister's plan to equip high schools with 'one laptop per child' may go open source. Kevin Rudd's $56 million digital revolution will include 'laptops [that will] run on an open source operating system with a suite of open source applications like those packaged under Edubuntu. This would include Open Office for productivity software, Gimp for picture editing and the Firefox internet browser.' So far this has been considered for New South Wales and I think other states may follow."
Don't believe it (Score:4, Informative)
The NSW State Govt can't organise a chook raffle let alone something such as equiping kids with open source laptops. It has bigger fish to fry.
Besides, the topic is slightly wrong. Rudd isn't part of an Australian State, his part of the Federal Government. Two different beasts. The State won't 'give', it will 'receive'.
Rudd wants to give lumps of cash to a number of States based on need, spending not just on technology, but more importantly on infrastructure, health and education.
Re:Times are different now. (Score:3, Informative)
If you would RTFA again you'd read that the mention of RedHat refers to other Australian government systems. The Linux distro under consideration here is Edubuntu.
And I'm quite glad of that.
Support costs are what schools are worried about.. (Score:3, Informative)
Support doesn't come cheap, in Victoria schools share one government provided technician amongst a local cluster of schools and the hours assigned per week are assessed on how many students are in the school. This can be about 10 hours per peek per school amongst 3 to 4 schools per technician. Some area's especially country area's one tech might only have 3 hours per school shared amongst 6 or 7 schools.
Any extra hours they have to pay for another technician out of their own budget.
A few years ago I was hired as a junior tech in a school working under the government provided tech, I was looking after a network of 150 PC's 5 servers and 28 staff notebooks for a school of some 550 students.
Schools are simply worried about the added support costs to this system because there will be no extra resources provided to schools to support this extra hardware.
The cost of a basic tech to look after this stuff could prevent many schools from providing special education teachers and reduce the overall quality of the education provided by the school.
I have no problems with Linux being adopted onto notebooks for students, I do have a problem with the affordability of the support available for Linux.
At the moment Linux technicians don't come as cheap as a Windows tech and trying to find a tech who can manage an extra 100 or so Linux notebooks while supporting an existing Windows curriculum network with bare minimum pay and resources, doesn't sound like a very appealing job.
If this program isn't properly funded for support it will be an absolute disaster because after 3 years the system will be run completley into the ground, and this is what many schools are worried about, they consider it throwing money away.
Re:In the middle of an economic crisis (Score:5, Informative)
It depends how the debt was incurred.
If the debt is incurred to fuel capital spending, then yes, the debt helps the nation to grow by increasing our productive capacity.
If the debt is incurred to fuel consumer spending, then it's bad debt.
Debt comes with interest payments. Paying interest on the debt only makes sense if the benefit received by the debt is greater than the interest paid. So it really depends how the debt is used as to whether or not the debt is bad.
As for Australia being a "developing" nation: what crap. Australia is not a "developing nation", according to all international benchmarks. We have one of the highest standards of living, next to the US and Japan.
Australia:
Infant mortality: 4 / 1000
Adult literacy (men): ~99%
Adult literacy (females): ~99%.
Life expectancy (males): 78.9 years
Life expectancy (females): 83.4 years
Per-capita GDP: 37,300 $US.
For truly developing nations, these statistics are much much worse. Take India, for example.
Infant mortality: 33 / 1000
Adult literacy (men): 76%
Adult literacy (females): 65%.
Life expectancy (males): 63.1 years
Life expectancy (females): 66 years
Per-capita GDP: 2,600 $US.
(Yes, I know that Qatar has the highest per-capita GDP, that's largely due to its reserves of oil. An outlier doesn't disqualify the general trend.)
Developing nation? Please. You either don't understand the term or are unqualified to speak about it.
Re:This won't happen (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft already did this. The Western Australian Education Department has a deal covering all of their schools. I was shocked when I found out why schools were putting in things like Exchange Server. They paid almost nothing for it. They were paying less than 10% of what I was paying for bulk licenses and they have all of that 'cheap, available' support for the MS products.
Re:In the middle of an economic crisis (Score:4, Informative)
I believe the GP was referring to the Late 80's recession (AKA, the early 90's recession) which like our current economic woes was mainly driven by external economic powers, but much I suspect the GP doesn't have a clue, just a significant political bias.
He also tends to forget that Labour had been in power for 5 terms, not 1 (Hawke government (Labour) was elected in 1983 for the uninitiated). He also forgets that the 1982 recession which was worse than the current or 1992 recession was under the Fraser government (Liberal).
Recessions in Australia are mainly driven by by external stresses(to Australia), our economy is tied to other key economies the US, Japan, Europe to a lesser extent(mostly a leftover from our days in the British Empire) and more recently China, because of this when their economies are up so is ours and when they go down Australia follows suit. Whilst personally I'm against Howard (mostly due to his stance on I.R.) he did do a decent job of the economy (granted in the halcyon days of 2000-2005 it wasn't a difficult job). If Rudd keeps the economy afloat in the current global crisis and by all indications he will, he has done just as good of a job with the economy. Australia has the second most stable banking system in the western world, second only to Canada so we will weather the current crisis but we will probably have to pull the belt in a few notches.
TFS behind TFA. RTFS - it's good. (Score:3, Informative)
Reading it, seems like they really have a solid grasp of the issues, and have made a cogent and excellent proposal.
Here's hoping it doesn't get subverted or ignored.
Re:Times are different now. (Score:5, Informative)
You're missing one critical difference between open source software and Windows: The open source software tends to improve with each release. That can't really be said for Windows.
Re:You are REALLY underestimating them. (Score:2, Informative)
However if they are communicating with other schools they may have some problems with sharing documents... espectially with the slight differences in formatting which can make a well formatted paper look like crap in an other office suit.
Why would high school students need to share documents with other schools? and since the other NSW schools will have the same software, why would they need to share documents with interstate schools, why in an editable format instead of pdf, and why if this level of cooperation is needed between interstate high school students can they not all install OOo? Don't think the other states participating in this interstate student document sharing project can afford the OOo licenses?